Amazon left Roomba with a huge mess to clean up
theverge.com
theverge.com
LIDAR bots are really cheap. It can’t be the cost of components. And no matter what you could certainly afford to put them on the most expensive bots and leave the really cheap ones with the pointless camera system.
I left the brand over it. There were some things I liked better but their VSLAM implementation is fundamentally flawed.
I wanted something that worked in 100% darkness, and LIDAR delivers that. So I don’t have to go around turning on lights, and I don’t have to worry it will get lost because I didn’t turn on lights.
Most things are a wash. The app is a little better than I remember the iRobot app being.
The auto empty dock works fine, the Roomba could tell you when the dock was full which I do miss. But that’s not an issue.
The mopping system doesn’t work for me due to how deep my carpet is. When the robot lifts the mop to travel it still hits my carpet. The Roomba system looks better where it lifts the mop all the way above the robot.
But I don’t care about the mop. That was just built-in so I tried it.
I’m happy I made the switch. I wish I didn’t have to. I was perfectly happy with my Roomba other than the navigation issue. But it was killer.
The DreameBot L20 Ultra can disconnect its mops and leave them in the dock. Roborock's Q Revo seems like it was based on the DreameBot L10s Ultra, so I've seen some guesses that it may eventually come to Roborock as well.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
The newer ones high end ones have front facing cameras. I don’t know if that’s a replacement or in addition to. And that’s the camera that might capture your stuff.
I think Roborock and others have copied the front facing camera. Seems like you could still spy with a LIDAR bit if you had that.
Got a standard roomba in 2011.
Got another one in 2022. Thought it would have improved? Nope. All the same. Get stuck in cables. Always so dumb and so slow. Hair still get stuck in the brush.
Got an app for it, which was really just a fancy way to start/stop.
Sure it “worked” but I was left with the impression that nothing had improved in a decade.
My wife couldn’t handle how slow it was so we ended up getting a wireless Dyson. Yes we have to vaccum “ourselves” but considering how much I had to manage the roomba to stop from being stuck everywhere, I’m now saving time.
This was my path as well. I did not have Roomba, but similar brand and it was constantly getting stuck in cables and under furniture. I am now using a battery vacuum cleaner and I am spending less time with cleaning than constantly babysitting my stupid robot vacuum cleaner.
Which I think is a good point. But the headline does not do an effective job of getting that across. It really does make it sound like Amazon was actively causing the problem as opposed to re-revealing it.
Maybe just shifting the order around would have been enough.
“Roomba left with a huge mess now that Amazon merger is off”.
The pun holds even better.
So who is to blame?
Roomba has been struggling to develop that. A lawnmower with the same navigation challenges as a Roomba vacuum is terrifying.
I can only imagine how burnt out that founder must be at this point -- decades of being on the bleeding edge of commercializing new technologies with so many misses along with hits, and a last decade where global competition headwinds make consumer robotics competition heavier than ever from China.
What does the EU have to do with anything? If a company is faced with a scenario of either it's taken over by another company or it dies, having to comply with anticompetitive regulation is the least of the company's problems.
Keep in mind that the company you're depicting as a poor victim is the dominant market leader with around half of the whole market share.
>The European Commission, the executive body of the EU, launched a probe in July, saying that the proposed deal could result in Amazon hindering iRobot rivals from competing on Amazon’s online marketplace. The commission argued that Amazon could delist or reduce rival products’ prominence in search results or elsewhere.
Amazon more than once hindered competitors on their marketplace, so their previous behavior is the reasons for the objection by the EU.
Who to blame for that?
* But despite my cleaning efforts, it does get stuck on wires. Sometimes it pulls out charging cables, and under my couch I have a bunch of those long orange power cables it sometimes climbs on and gets stuck on. Are there any competitors that can automagically avoid wires? Ideally ones where I will not need to use an app of any sort.
Their dual brush system was better. It let them use less suction so they got better results while being quieter. But the patent just expired, so that advantage is gone.
Their VSLAM navigation can’t compete with LIDAR.
They’re in deep trouble. And if their big plan was “Amazon will save us somehow“ that’s gone too.
I think someone else had made one before them, maybe a few. But they didn’t work well. They made the first one that actually worked well. Because of that I’m not sure how much they would be able to patent. Honestly it’s effectively a vacuum to vacuum out your vacuum. Maybe it was just considered obvious by the patent office.
I do know that theirs could tell when it was full. Which is a nice feature. The Roborock docks, at least as of my model which is maybe two years old, couldn’t do that. Whether that’s due to design or just cost savings I have no idea.
I did not get that from the article at all.
Amazon and iRobot call off their planned acquisition
A) you just described the Open Source dilemma. One I've been dwelling on for some time with little in the way of suggestions.
B) while your narrative is popular, the idea that "Chinese just copy" is rapidly becoming obsolete. I bought a Chinese inverter last year that is cheaper, and has a lot more features than the "established US brand". Equally Roombas have lagged in some areas, despite the R&D investment. It's this lagging which is hurting the cause.
My point is China doesn’t do a lot of the up front R&D. They ride off the back of copies. But they are really good at improving them.